Lucy Snowe Character Analysis

Villette is an incredibly character driven and focused novel, centered on comedic coincidences that deal with bumping into the same people in completely different places. This focus on the characters, and their many quirks, is a true testament to Bronte’s writing abilities. She possess the ability to make one absolutely loathe certain parts of a character, while sympathizing with others. Each character has been pushed to their limit, each representing a different aspect of society and the place of women in a male-dominated world. With Lucy as the narrator, the reader sees how each person she encounters changes her ever so slightly, testing her resiliency, though she knows who she is and refuses to settle as whatever others expect of her, we just have to figure out what she expects from us. Lucy Snowe is an extremely unapologetic character; one that is unperturbed in the fact that the life that she is living is one that falls outside of the patriarchal structure that she has been brought up to find a role within. Even amidst criticism, Lucy is able to demonstrate that it is possible to work to support oneself without relying on a man in order to do so. The majority of her success comes from her own …show more content…
She is not afraid to be brutally honest, going as far as calling out Ginevra’s vanity and locking a kid in a book closet. Her last name reflects her personality, the coldest person anyone will ever meet. Even so, Lucy is an enigma. She hardly reveals anything about herself, and often talks to the reader in little apostrophes. The reader hardly receives any information about Lucy from herself, and must learn from clues given by other characters and their interactions with the narrator. This entitles a very different experience for every reader, because each will pick up on clues that others may not